Nick Hackworth

Sophia Al-Maria - Taraxos

Exhibitions Serpentine Gallery

As Director, Modern Forms, Nick worked with the curatorial team at Serpentine Galleries on Serpentine x Modern Forms Sculpture Commission, which selected and realised Sophia Al-Maria’s extraordinary public sculpture project Taraxos.

Taraxos will be installed near Serpentine North Gallery from 21 June 2021-April 2022.

Sophia Al-Maria's first public artwork Tarraxos will be sited in Kensington Gardens adjacent to the Serpentine Gallery. It is a 'stage' space intended as a site for thinking and listening, and as a foil to the rhetoric of Speaker's Corner situated close-by in Hyde Park. The title of the work stems from the word 'taraxacum', a genus of the self-seeding dandelion flower common in Europe and North America. Al-Maria is interested in how a 'weed' like the dandelion propagates, and how that might be a model for ways of seeding difficult-to-articulate thoughts and feeling through movement, meditation or listening.